What is working for you?

Eating and drinking whatever I want provided I am staying within my calorie and macro targets.

Weight training

Light cardio.

This post is entitled "what is working for you?".

I eat what I want when I want but I make sure I stay within my calorie allowance. In other words, I've lost weight because I've eaten in a calorie deficit.

I weight lift and run, and do other exercise each day, which tones, gives me endurance, and helps to create a calorie deficit, but it is not necessary to lose weight.

As for your remark about the "simple answers"- it really is THAT simple, it's just that people make losing weight so difficult.

It really is that simple: eat at a calorie deficit and you will lose weight. Exercise to keep in shape: resistance training to ensure that most of what you lose is fat, and cardio to improve stamina. Make sure that any dietary changes you make are ones you want to maintain for the rest of your life: don't cut out a food unless you plan to never eat it again. Instead, cut back on things that don't meet your calorie goals: 1/2 oz. of cheese instead of a giant piece, for example (I love cheese!).

However, simple doesn't mean easy. You're basically going to be starving yourself, in the sense that you will be routinely eating fewer calories than you need to maintain your weight. The rest will come from fat stores. Since we have evolved to eat when food is available, reserving fat stores for lean times, you'll need to deal with cravings for food, which is exacerbated by the fact that those of us who are overweight generally don't have a reliable appetite and are likely to get hungry even if we're eating enough to maintain our weight.

Some things that have helped me along the way are:

* Planning meals in advance, cooking them, and carefully weighing ingredients to get accurate calorie counts.

* Pre-logging much of my food, including what I plan for dinner, so that I know how much wiggle room (if any) I have for snacks or treats.

* Exercising a lot, and using an accurate heart rate monitor for cardio, which lets me eat more.

* Learning that after about three weeks, I stopped getting frequent hunger pangs in mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Your body will adapt to burning fat stores as a matter of course. The first three weeks last January were tough; now it's much easier for me to eat at a calorie deficit. (However, for the last two weeks I've been at maintenance, during the holidays--I'm wondering how hard it will be to return to a deficit next week!)

That last point is important. If you can stick it out, it does get easier.

I don't agree with everything John Walker wrote in his book "The Hacker's Diet," but I recommend that everyone read it. And it's free online: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/

Good luck!

ETA: Oh, and as Phaedra2013 wrote, use online calculators, etc., only as estimates. Compare your data with your results. If you're eating what MFP says is a 1000 calorie/day deficit, and you're losing only 1 lb. a week, your real deficit is only 500 calories/day. So many threads on these forums have people claiming that they are on a plateau despite eating only 1200 calories/day while exercising hard for two hours and not eating back exercise calories. All those threads show is that the posters are wildly off in their estimates of calories eaten, calories burned, or both.

2 words. Calorie deficit! That's all it takes